Black linework tattoo of a unicorn head inside overlapping diamond outlines with dotwork shading, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Unicorn head in geometric frames on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A unicorn head with a flowing mane and spiral horn is drawn in black linework, with stippled dotwork shading on the muzzle and around the eyes. It sits within layered diamond and triangle outlines, with a faint dotted circle behind the top of the design. The tattoo is shown in black ink on pale skin against a dark background, with the composition centred and symmetrical.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Unicorn Horse Horn Mane Diamond Triangle Geometric frame Dotted circle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite on the shingle at Skerra has been tilting since the storm, and you are the only one left on the island who knows how to level it. Old Mairi Tulloch kept the triangulation ledger in a hand like barbed wire, and she left you three columns of bearings and one drawing: a horse with a spiral horn, boxed inside nested diamonds, with a dotted ring drawn round its crown as though the sky were a compass face.

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The ferry does not return until Thursday, so you spend the evenings at the trig point with a sharpened pencil, tying each bearing to the next. The diamonds fall into place. Each one is a sighting, each triangle a closed loop of walking. On the third night the horn points true north, and the pricked dots on the muzzle line up with the bench marks cut into the cliff path, as though someone had stippled the island's outline onto paper with a needle.

Mairi's last entry is dated the night she went out to the rocks. Beneath it she has drawn the head again, not as a beast but as a fixing point, the place where three lines cross and nothing can drift. You walk the path with the ledger under your arm, stopping at each dot to lift the instrument. Every reading agrees with hers to the second decimal.

On Thursday the ferryman finds you sitting on the sea wall, the theodolite packed, the ledger open on your knees. He asks whether the survey is finished. You tell him the island is exactly where it was, which he takes for a joke, and you let him. Below you the tide is climbing, and at its height the water lies in a perfect ring along the harbour wall, the same dotted circle Mairi drew, and you watch it settle there and stay.